The graph is param → sales_responsible → notifications. There are two options here:
xref is collapsing transient deps: you can verify this removing the --label compile option and finding this path in the graph
xref is correct - that’s the dep but you can’t see how it happens and I can’t help without seeing the files either
What I’ve been doing now is, as you suggested, dropping --label compile and going through the results doing this:
^lib/connect/externals/sales_responsible.exlib/connect/externals/sales_responsible.ex
└── lib/connect/teams/team.ex
Doing that I was able to find this (one branch of a handful) out of the 2000 line long xref result.
lib/connect_web/protocols/param.ex
lib/connect/externals/sales_responsible.ex (compile)
lib/connect/teams/team.ex
lib/connect/teams/member.ex
lib/connect/tenancy/member.ex
lib/connect/tenancy/invitation/manager_invitation.ex
lib/connect/tenancy/invitation.ex
lib/connect/notifications/notifications/invitation.ex
lib/connect/notifications/notifications.ex
Having that work be done by xref on the actual graph it (probably) builds and outputting a dot graph or text based format of just the paths between lib/connect_web/protocols/param.ex and lib/connect/notifications/notifications.ex is what I’d be interested in. Doing mix xref graph --sink …/notifications.ex --format dot without such a filter results in a non-comprehensible graph.
Edit:
The middle part of lib/connect/externals/sales_responsible.ex → lib/connect/tenancy/invitation/manager_invitation.ex btw are only ecto relationships. So those still can be problematic even without them being compile time dependencies anymore.
Edit 2:
The likely best solution was to breaking up a circular dependency between lib/connect/tenancy/invitation/manager_invitation.ex and lib/connect/tenancy/invitation.ex.
You can now specify both --source and --sink in master, allowing you to see all possible paths between two files.
That sounds great and like what I was asking for, though I’m not yet seeing it on master on github.
Just tried it out. It still shows a a bunch more files, but it listed this in the very beginning, which is basically what I had above (the last dependency is different because of the refactoring I did today):
lib/connect_web/protocols/param.ex
├── lib/connect/externals/marketing_responsible.ex (compile)
│ └── lib/connect/teams/team.ex
│ ├── lib/connect/teams/member.ex
│ │ ├── lib/connect/teams/team.ex
│ │ └── lib/connect/tenancy/member.ex
│ │ ├── lib/connect/tenancy/invitation/manager_invitation.ex
│ │ │ ├── lib/connect/tenancy/invitation.ex
│ │ │ │ ├── lib/connect/notifications/notifications.ex
Maybe there could be a shortest path only option, but the text format seems to start with that one anyways.
The dot graph is still a bit big and doesn’t feel useful in my case yet, but it is by far more usable than before and combined with the text format your changes are already really helpful.